Who's in charge?

Eric Holder has announced that global financial institutions are too big to prosecute (perhaps this one reason not a single high-echelon banker or member of large bank boards of directors have yet to be prosecuted since 2008). But this hasn't stopped the FDIC, representing 38 banks and financial institutions that were forced into bankruptcy in large part because of losses incurred on interest-rate derivative products sold to them by the world's biggest banks. Last month, it filed a civil suit in New York against sixteen of the world's largest financial institutions (Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase, and Citibank amongst them), all of whom have representatives that set the LIBOR interest rates and manipulated them during the financial crisis.

These rates affect anywhere from $300-$400 trillion of securities worldwide, depending on your source. In addition to the banks that bought these interest-rate swap securities and ended up paying higher rates than expected and/or highly inflated termination fees, other major institutions are still at the mercy of the global banking fraud. The biggest victims have been city and state governments, universities, pension and retirement funds, and other public entities. In the United States, it is thought that municipalities and other large non-profits are thought to have as much as $300 billion in outstanding swap contracts based on LIBOR, deals in which they are trapped due to prohibitive termination fees. Detroit is one of the more well-known cities bankrupted by this scam, but hundreds more teeter on the edge. In California, alone (for example), ten cities (San Francisco, Corcoran, Los Angeles, Menlo Park, Oakland, Oxnard, Pittsburgh, Richmond, Riverside, and Sacramento), one community college district, one utility district, one transportation authority, and the state itself, the collective tab was $365 million in swap payments annually, with total termination fees exceeding $1 billion.

Here's one way it works. The wall separating financial institutions from public institutions was long ago removed. Now, there is a revolving door between the world of Wall Street finance and the governing boards and high executive positions at American universities and other public organizations. Financial attorneys advising the governing boards of retirement and pension funds once worked in the financial sector.

A very important question is not being asked: With all of this information available (even if monetary resolution still seems years, if not decades, down the road), why do state and local governments continue to do business with a corrupt global banking cartel? And why is a woman like Elizabeth Warren consistently marginalized by the Powers that Be?